There was a discussion on the Communities Dominate Brands blog, Baron95 (don’t know his/her real name) and Tomi Ahonen were discussing Apple. It was obvious that there were a couple of things about Apple that they were missing, so I’m writing this as an explanation.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the NSA Spying Scandal closely. In fact, I’ve been following it for several years, since before I first ran into Barrett Brown. Seriously. The leaks about go back a long way, and most writers appear to have missed the implications.

It’s rather amazing how many Americans freak out about Marxists, and spend huge amounts of time thinking about Marxist plans for a revolution. What they don’t realize is that the revolution began in 1969, is still ongoing, and that it wasn’t the Marxists, or any of the other ‘ists’ who started it, and it won’t be any of them who wins it.

Kim Dotcom is a maniac. But a smart maniac. He’s just offered every creative person on the planet 50 Gigabytes of free cloud storage!

Think about it. You’re a writer. You’ve got a thousand text/document files that maybe take up a gigabyte at worst. Lose them, and you are out of business. Yes, you can back them up. What if your house burns down taking out your computer and backup drive?

Having an additional encrypted backup on the Cloud, that is accessible anywhere, anytime, is a fantastic option. And as long as you keep under 50 Gigabytes, it’s free.

Last but not least, the interface is usable. I’ve seen file management systems that look like they were designed by Satan. This one is good. Also I’ve heard rumours of people building automatic backup systems for Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows systems…

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Shops
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward the Tablet Brigade!
Charge for the consumers!" he said.
Into the valley of Shops
Rode the six hundred.

I was talking to Science Fiction and Fantasy writer and old friend Shirley Meier about publishing options. One thing that I pointed out was that Shirley needed a “Shirley” website. She has sites. Eclipse Court tells part of an enormous future history. Another is about her Shiatsu training.

I love reading the more creative spam. Some of it’s absolutely hilarious. A long time ago, when UseNet was more active, I used to take part in a NewsGroup dedicated to making fun of spam, and spammers. We put together some truly funny stuff.

My favorite wasn’t actually spam – a researcher who was doing a sociological study on love and sex made the mistake of posting a questionnaire to EVERY alt.sex NewsGroup, including ALT.SEX.CTHULHU. Several of us answered it, taking the roles of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth (my contribution), and other entities who’s main interest in humans was as a dietary supplement. I wonder to this day what she thought when she saw those responses!

I was running Moon OS 2.0 on the Acer laptop, but when the left button on the track pad died, I started having problems. And, yes, before you say it I know I can plug an optical mouse into one of the USB ports. I ask you to consider what I’m going to use as a mouse pad – my dog’s backside? The leather couch that I usually work at?

I knew that Ubuntu would consider a double tap on the track pad as a double click on the left button, but I wanted to try something different. I hadn’t used Fedora in ages (Fedora 7) so I downloaded the Fedora 11 release candidate, and installed it. The install was smooth, the Gnome desktop, well it’s Gnome. The installed software didn’t quite fit my needs, but that’s easy enough to fix. I quite liked it. The only problem was it didn’t accept tapping on the track pad, which made it unusable. Which is a real pity, I really wanted to do a long term test of Fedora.

But I have to work, so I installed Ubuntu. And this is where the real fun began. Everything set up, including wireless. But things just didn’t seem right. But it was usable, so I ignored the things that didn’t look right until I fired up Open Office, and realized it was version 2.4!

Oops. I’d grabbed the wrong CD, and installed 8.04 instead. Since I’d already moved most of my data onto the computer, I decided to try the update route instead. I updated to 8,10, and then updated to 9.04. It took a while, but everything worked fine, and quite frankly it was so easy, pretty well any user could do it.